I have something like 1200 mods (thank goodness for mod managers), and this is a CONSTANT problem for me. Same pattern: content manager will not load; sim works fine (as far as I can tell); and hangs on “return to main menu” from an active flight.
But not every mod will trigger this hang. I can mix and match to get down to a set that works fine with the sim, with some effort. Here are some general notes I’ve accumulated:
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Mods that were compiled pre-SU5 (i.e. the date of their last update was before that) are a common cause, especially for scenery add-ons. I have everything pre-August 2021 segregated, and deactivating these used to solve the issue in most cases. But not anymore – see below.
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Older liveries can cause issues in general; I’m not sure if this is one of them.
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This is just a hunch, but it seems that some of the “suspect” mods (dated pre-SU7) will work fine on their own, but seem to not work in conjunction with other, newer mods.
Before the last update, this was a manageable issue. But after the last update, things got significantly worse. To give a quick example – I organize my US mods by region, so I have sub-folders labeled “Northeast”, “South”, “Midwest”, etc. As of, say, Thanksgiving, I was able to set up presets for each region that worked, and that worked together, so I could just select the “good” Northeast and Midwest if I planned to go from Boston to Chicago and wanted those assets loaded. Now, I can barely get one region to work. I can add one or two mods from a second region, tops. And setups that work one night might not work the next night, if something’s been updated. It’s like there’s an effective cap on the number of mods the sim will accept before throwing the Content Manager hang issue. (I’ve also been getting CTDs again, which had been completely absent since SU5, but that’s a separate issue… maybe.)
I’m no expert, so I don’t have any real insight into what could be causing this. But something has definitely changed, and for the worse, with the last update.
I wish I could find some sort of characteristic that the “bad” mods have that’s a flag for this issue, but there’s nothing obvious, and I can’t really dig into the underlying details of a compiled project, even if I had that sort of time.
(Completely speculating, but the nature of the issues I’ve been having seem to point towards some kind of memory or disc access issue within the sim.)
